On a vacant lot next door to the Insite supervised drug injection facility in Vancouver’s gritty Downtown Eastside, a busy little beehive is teaching people about hope and redemption and erasing long-held misconceptions.

For Jim McLeod, at 36 still battling issues with drug addiction, caring for the hive of honey-producing bees has taught him patience and how to look beyond the day-to-day stresses of trying to survive in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood.

For Julia Common, once a privileged private school community coordinator and the sponsor of the hive, putting bees into the lot — the site of the Hastings Folk Garden food garden — has erased a fear of associating with people in the Downtown Eastside.

And for Common’s daughter Sarah, who works for the Portland Hotel Society, it has strengthened her bonds with her mother and revealed unexpected strengths among the people she assists.

“I’ve seen what the bees do for people. I’ve seen it actually help them, give them a purpose,” Julia said Thursday.

Tucked up against a brick wall in the middle of the garden at 177 East Hastings, the colony is bursting with spring activity as worker bees fly out and return loaded with pollen and nectar from myriad rooftop gardens, weedy boulevards and forage along edges of the nearby port lands. The bees spiral up and down in tight circles to get into the hive, which is housed behind a square screen fence.

As he adjusted a white veil that screens his head from the bees as he works around them, McLeod said he’s learned as much about himself as he has about the bees. “I still have some drug issues myself,” he said. “I think it is very therapeutic and rewarding, especially when you get the honey. You have to keep control of yourself and work slowly and carefully or you’ll get stung. You can’t relapse and work around them.”

Last fall the hive produced 145 pounds of honey, an astounding bounty considering the average Metro Vancouver beehive produces less than 80 pounds. Volunteers working with the Commons extracted two varieties, one a dark and aromatic honey and the other a golden yellow mixture. Branded “Downtown Eastside Honey,” the supply quickly sold out through a local store.

That first project was such a success that Julia, 59, formed the non-profit society Hives for Humanity with her savings. Julia, a longtime hobbyist beekeeper, is now placing dozens of hives on rooftop gardens and in backyards and food garden plots along the East Hastings corridor, all with the aim of teaching local residents how to keep bees. This year she’s already installed 10 hives and has ordered another 50, making her the largest social enterprise beekeeper in Vancouver. So far she has put in $60,000 of her own savings but is hoping to find a benefactor or sponsor who can help underwrite the costs.

All of the hives are now owned by societies Julia works with, including the Portland, the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, Raincity Housing and a small independent school. She provides the equipment and bees at cost, and those who can pay, do. She is also working to establish a “honey house” where the societies can all extract and process their product.

Sarah, 28, says beekeeping presents a therapeutic or meditative opportunity for members of the community. She says it is “also an opportunity for capacity building with the community and an opportunity for building self-worth and ownership with the community through the garden and apiary.

“It is a positive thing in everybody’s lives every week to have this be an element that they can be a part of. It has provided a lot of opportunities for therapy, for education and also for connecting,” she said. “It has been a really grounding activity, for me too.”

The project started out of the Commons trying to find a little bit of common ground. Julia said she didn’t like her daughter working in the Downtown Eastside. Sarah wanted to learn beekeeping and spend more time with her mother, but is devoted to her jobs as the coordinator of the Portland’s drug users’ resource centre and volunteer coordinator of the Hastings Folk Garden Society.

“I never understood why she wants to stay there working with people in the eastside. I never got it,” Julia said. “Then, I stopped trying to get her out and as a mother gave in. I became more accepting, and embraced it in those funny terms mothers do.”

Sarah sweetened the pot by asking her mother to place a beehive in the Hastings Folk Garden. “I asked Mom to come down and teach people how to raise bees, and also I have the benefit of seeing more of her,” Sarah said.

At first the thought of going into the Downtown Eastside paralyzed Julia because of her entrenched societal views.

“I thought the people down there were completely unpredictable, frightening to me, unappealing to look at. The place is dirty, overrun by rats, with the constant sound of ambulances and fire trucks. There is no peace,” Julia said. “I also couldn’t imagine there was any forage for the bees and I was worried that they wouldn’t be safe and that the equipment would be vandalized.”

That, she says, is when her education began “and it has been a pretty steep learning curve ever since.”

“What I found out is it is a community. I am no longer afraid down there. It is quite the contrary. People help me all the time and they are very, very polite. I can’t believe what a tight community they are and how well they look after one another.”

It was a comment McLeod made to Julia at the end of the last season about wanting to come back this spring that prompted her to jump fully into expanding Hives for Humanity.

“I asked Sarah if anybody in the Downtown Eastside talks about “next year” and she said “don’t be ridiculous. It’s day to day here, Mom, and not your Zen day-to-day but what do I have to do to survive this day,” Julia recalled. “When I told her I just had this conversation with Jim about the spring, she said, ‘Oh my God, that is really significant.” That is when I realized I could not pull out, that actually I had to come back with the bees.”

McLeod said he sees the bees as a symbol of hope for many people. “It’s very beneficial here for the garden. It is good too because it draws more people in and gets attention here,” he said. “I get to tell people I work with the bees and they like having them here.”

Julia said the project has been an epiphany. “Now I get to work with the non-indulged, people in need and who appreciate everything and who don’t consider it their right to have everything. It is an incredible demographic to be working with. Now I completely understand why Sarah does it.”

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